{"id":43835,"date":"2015-11-08T16:18:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-08T16:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43835"},"modified":"2015-11-08T16:18:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-08T16:18:12","slug":"slaverys-hidden-history-an-interview-with-historian-eric-foner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43835","title":{"rendered":"Slavery\u2019s Hidden History: An interview with historian Eric Foner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavery\u2019s Hidden History: An interview with historian Eric Foner<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

American Libraries<\/a>
\n2015-10-27<\/p>\n

George M. Eberhart<\/strong><\/a>, Editor<\/p>\n

Eric Foner<\/a>\u2014Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning historian, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad<\/a><\/em> (W. W. Norton, 2015), Columbia University professor, and author of more than 20 history texts\u2014spoke to American Libraries<\/em> about his latest book and his plans for the future. Foner\u2019s specialty is the American Civil War<\/a> and Reconstruction<\/a>, and he has been teaching a popular course on that topic to Columbia undergraduates for more than 30 years. His book Reconstruction: America\u2019s Unfinished Revolution, 1863\u20131877<\/a><\/em> (Harper and Row, 1988) is recognized as a definitive work on federal attempts to rebuild the South and establish equal constitutional rights for African-Americans. Foner is giving a talk about the Underground Railroad<\/a> at the Chicago Humanities Festival<\/a> on October 31.<\/p>\n

Your most recent book is a fascinating look at the Underground Railroad and antislavery networks of pre\u2013Civil War New York City<\/a>. Explain how you came across the document that shed new light on these events.<\/strong><\/p>\n

ERIC FONER<\/strong>: It was totally accidental. Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major at Columbia who also worked for my family as a dog walker, was writing a senior thesis a few years ago about Sydney Howard Gay<\/a>, an abolitionist editor here in New York City. Gay\u2019s papers, about 80 boxes of them, are in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library<\/a>. One day she said to me, \u201cYou know, Professor Foner, in one box there is a document having to do with fugitive slaves. I\u2019m not quite sure what it is. It\u2019s not relevant for my work, but you might find it interesting.\u201d So I filed that in the back of my mind, and one day I was in the library and decided to look at that document. It was actually two little notebooks, dating from 1855 and 1856 when Gay was editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard<\/em><\/a> and actively assisting escaped slaves. He kept a record of more than 200 men, women, and children who passed through New York City, and he called it the \u201cRecord of Fugitives.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavery\u2019s Hidden History: An interview with historian Eric Foner American Libraries 2015-10-27 George M. Eberhart, Editor Eric Foner\u2014Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning historian, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton, 2015), Columbia University professor, and author of more than 20 history texts\u2014spoke to American Libraries about his latest book and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,13743,8,6940,20],"tags":[21813,21814,16174,21816,21815,8919],"class_list":["post-43835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-american-libraries","tag-american-libraries-magazine","tag-eric-foner","tag-george-eberhart","tag-george-m-eberhart","tag-underground-railroad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43837,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43835\/revisions\/43837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}